Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy

366 Pages·2006·4.16 MB·English

by  Shlomo Ben-Ami

scars of war,
wounds of peace
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scars of war,
wounds of peace
The Israeli-Arab Tragedy
SHLOMO BEN-AMI
2006
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Copyright © 2006 by Shlomo Ben-Ami
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ben-Ami, Shlomo.
Scars of war, wounds of peace : the Israeli-Arab tragedy / Shlomo Ben-Ami.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-518158-6
ISBN-10: 0-19-518158-1
1. Arab-Israeli conflict. 2. Arab-Israeli conflict—1993– —Peace.
3. Zionism—History. 4. Israel—Politics and government. I. Title.
DS119.7.B3826 2005
956.9405—dc22
2005025383
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Let war yield to peace, laurels to paeans.
(Cedant arma togae, concedant laurea laudi)
Cicero, De Officiis, Book I, Chapter 
Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end.
But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
Sir Winston Churchill, speech at the Mansion House,
London,  November 
Contents
List of Maps ix
Preface xi
I Prelude: The Birth of an Intractable Conflict 
II Bisecting the Land or Zionism’s Strategy of Phases? 
III The Early Years: A Missed Opportunity for Peace? 
IV The Rise and Fall of the Third Kingdom of Israel 
V The Jewish Fear and Israel’s Mother of all Victories 
VI Sedanlaghen – The Sin of Hubris and its Punishment 
VII Begin’s ‘Capsule Theory’ and Sadat’s ‘Separate Peace’ 
VIII The Road to Madrid 
IX Oslo: The Glory and the Agony 
X The Barak Phase: On Freedom and Innocence 
XI The Politics of Doomsday 
XII Conclusions 
Bibliography 
Index 
Maps
. The United Nations partition plan,  
. Israel after the armistice agreements in  
. Israel and the occupied territories,  
. Clinton’s peace plan,  
Preface
‘Do you think we can still make it?’ I was asked by President Clinton
when, on Saturday,  December , I was leaving the Cabinet Room
adjacent to the Oval Office in the White House where the President had
just finished communicating to the Israeli and Palestinian delegations to
the peace talks his final parameters for a settlement.
‘I don’t know, Mr President,’ I replied, ‘if we have enough political
time left to wrap up an agreement, but what I am sure of is that if we
fail, we’ll all have plenty of time to write books about it.’
After the sad chapter of our failure, Israelis and Palestinians, to reach
a final peace settlement during President Clinton’s last year at the White
House, I did write about it in a book published in France (Quel avenir
pour Israel?) and, in a more comprehensive work written in Hebrew, my
personal account and perspective of the evolution of the peace process
in its last phases, A Front Without a Home Front: A Voyage to the Boundaries
of the Peace Process.
When considering the preparation of an English version of those
books, I decided that, however important a separate analysis of both the
Oslo process and the latest chapter of the peace talks surely are for
drawing the necessary lessons for any future attempt to solve the Israeli–
Palestinian tragedy, it should not be seen in isolation from the wider
history of the Arab–Israeli conflict and of earlier stages in the quest for
peace in the Middle East. Our capacity to better understand the present
and look with sobriety at the future needs to draw on, and be inspired
by, a broader historical perspective. When we went to Camp David,
Prime Minister Ehud Barak took with him Alistair Horne’s book on the
war of Algeria and the subsequent peace with France, A Savage War of
Peace, while I looked for inspiration in Henry Kissinger’s study on the
Congress of Vienna and the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, A World
Restored: the Politics of Conservatism in a Revolutionary Age. Neither of these
books is, of course, a bad adviser for anyone willing to draw lessons for
a transition from war to peace. But I later thought that an insightful
overview of the history of the Arab–Israeli conflict, and especially that
of the Palestinian dilemma, might certainly have been no less helpful to
us both.
xii Scars of War, Wounds of Peace
It subsequently occurred to me that I might try some day to write such
a book myself. After all, I have always kept abreast of the literature, old
and new, about the subject. And for years the Arab–Israeli conflict and
the frustrated attempts to solve it have been for me a profound personal
andintellectual preoccupation.Throughout mypublic life,bothin politics
and outside it, I have participated in the heated debates on the subject
of war and peace, I have written extensively on ways to solve the conflict,
and I was privileged eventually to be allowed to make my own effort at
peacemaking on the tortuous road of trial and error that is the Arab–
Israeli peace process.
The  war was was a watershed in the life of the Israelis of my
generation. Zionism was being dangerously redefined, we thought, by the
encounter of the Israelis with the biblical lands of Judaea and Samaria,
and by an infatuation with the new territories. The occupation also turned
Zionism into a highly loaded term, too frequently vilified outside Israel
as a reproachable ideology. I am a Zionist, and an ardent one at that. But
I have fought to define the boundaries of the idea by a respect for the
right of Israel’s Palestinian neighbours to a life of sovereignty and dignity.
What drove me to look back at the source and at the history of the
conflict, and later into the attempts to solve it, can be summed up in
something that I said to an Israeli newspaper, Yedioth Aharonoth, before I
departed for Taba to lead the Israeli team in a last-ditch attempt to save
the Israeli–Palestinian peace process from collapse:
A normal state is not supposed to settle beyond its legitimate borders.
We have created a state, we have been admitted to the UN, we strive
to have orderly relations with the international community, yet we still
continue to behave as if we are a Yishuv. The entire peace enterprise
of this government is aimed at leading the nation to choose, once and
for all, between being a state or a Yishuv.
It is to the shaping of the Israeli mind by the legacy of the Yishuv, where
the utter rejection by the Arabs of a Jewish entity in their midst died so
hard, that one needs to go back in order to trace the origins and the
evolution of Israel’s penchant for formulating policies only on the basis
of worst-case scenarios. Zionism was the territorial answer to the Jewish
fear and this fear has never subsided since.
Raymond Aron was once asked why he, who had such a keen interest
in politics, was never tempted to become a politician himself. ‘The reason
I am not a politician’, he said, ‘is that I want to understand.’ This book
is my own attempt to ‘understand’. The need to look at the broader
picture and to put the short, even if certainly significant, chapter where